Voice response units are used in a variety of applications today to resolve customer problems and questions in conjunction with customer service representatives. In a financial service industry, such voice response units often provide users general information via one or more automated messages. Usually, the user is also given the option to either bypass an automated message or after the automated message has concluded to interact with a customer service representative in order to receive more detailed information tailored to an account of the user.
For example, a user may request to close an account, for example, with a credit card company. Thereafter, the user may contact the credit card company to confirm that an account is closed or when an account will close if the account has not been closed. The user receives very little information, if any, from automated messages, but rather must speak with a customer service representative to receive information about the status of the account that was previously requested to be closed. As a result, since such users would rather speak with a customer service representative because the information provided via automated messages is not sufficient and/or because of lack of patience navigating through several automated messages to find out the necessary information, there is an overload of calls that must be serviced by customer service representatives. Consequently, companies, such as credit card companies, incur tremendous expenses in having to handle these calls with customer service representatives, as opposed to having the calls handled solely through the voice response unit. For example, millions of customer service calls a year are to inquire about an account previously requested to be closed and it cost companies millions of dollars to handle these calls. Specifically, many of these calls will be to confirm that an account is closed, identify when an account will close if the account is not closed already, check the status of a refund check and/or to inquire about automatic charges posting to an account.
Accordingly, a need exist for an automated system and method whereby the number of calls to customer service representatives are mitigated due to detailed information being provided to a user via automated messages regarding the status of an account that was requested to be closed by the user. More particularly, there is a need for an automated system and method that automatically identifies that a user is calling about an account that was requested to be closed and for providing to that user via automated messages account status information tailored to the closing account.